


The Air a Tangled Web

by ArachneJericho



Series: Seal Tales: Beginnings [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, Kirin, Mythical Beings & Creatures, Non-Binary Trans Character, Original Work - Seal Tales, Trans Character, Vietnamese Mythology, ky-lan
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-12
Updated: 2014-03-12
Packaged: 2018-01-15 11:07:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,090
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1302619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArachneJericho/pseuds/ArachneJericho
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>It seems the air is in a tangled web </em><br/><em>That each step tears and each move rips. </em><br/><em>Serene the eve lingers in dusky haze. </em><br/><em>Though safe my heart wallows in mild soft gloom.</em><br/>— <a href="http://thehuuvandan.org/vietpoet.html#xuandieu">Xuân Diệu</a>, translated by Thomas D. Le</p><p> </p><p>The fairy-tale book lay open in his lap as Robert Sanger leaned back against the old apple tree and contemplated the lie that his life had been. The wind whispered through the leaves, the sunlight dappling through them, golden light wavering as uncertain as reality itself under his attempted grasps at it. Things are difficult when, all your life, believing yourself human, you find out that you are a mythical creature. Robert could count himself lucky that he had discovered this near the end of his freshman year; any later, and he might have been driven mad or, worse, completely ignored the call of his true self. He did not think himself lucky, however.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Air a Tangled Web

_It seems the air is in a tangled web_  
 _That each step tears and each move rips._  
 _Serene the eve lingers in dusky haze._  
 _Though safe my heart wallows in mild soft gloom.  
— [Xuân Diệu](http://thehuuvandan.org/vietpoet.html#xuandieu), translated by Thomas D. Le_

The fairy-tale book lay open in his lap as Robert Sanger leaned back against the old apple tree and contemplated the lie that his life had been. The wind whispered through the leaves, the sunlight dappling through them, golden light wavering as uncertain as reality itself under his attempted grasps at it. Things are difficult when, all your life, believing yourself human, you find out that you are a mythical creature. Robert could count himself lucky that he had discovered this near the end of his freshman year; any later, and he might have been driven mad or, worse, completely ignored the call of his true self. He did not think himself lucky, however.

For one thing, he had, at the prompting of his adoptive parents, given up on his Vietnamese heritage. “We saved you from the rice paddies,” they said outright in the past, and repeatedly. Their disapproval of his distant home was constantly implied, in a, “You can explore the idea if you like, but remember how third-world and backwards Vietnam is. You don’t want to be that. You want to soar, like an American,” sort of way.

They were his parents. Of course he listened to them. And he wanted so much to soar, to not be like the disadvantaged people in his past, which he wanted to bury, deep beneath the ground, so deep that he could forget he was tainted.

This kind of attitude is doubly embarrassing when you discover that you are a ky-lan, one of the sacred animals of Vietnam. He had dreamed one night that he was looking into a still pool in a strange forest, and instead of the tainted face he despised, he saw that of a blend between a horse’s strong features and the delicate nature of a deer’s. He was a dark green, his scales rippling with gold and an opal-like teal. His mane and whiskers tickled his neck and cheeks, and the heavy weight of complex antlers weighed down his head. In his dream, thinking of who possessed those features, she corrected herself.

She did not wake up human so much as shift back into his human form.

Afterwards, he could willingly shift back and forth, and given the mundane terror of projects, homework, and exams over the next few months, he concluded that it was all not a dream, but how he could define his new state of being he could not determine.

The first semester had been thrilling.

But when he went home, and began discussing his desire to learn more about his true heritage (he did not mention the transformation in any way), and especially the myths of his country, his parents went quiet at the dinner table. They did not encourage him; instead, they changed the subject to that of his studies (undecided, and a little scattered towards literature and mathematics) and whether he had made friends or discovered intimacy.

During the last week of winter break, he asked outright about the family they had adopted him from. When their outraged silence persisted, he relented, he thought, and asked only for his original name.

His mother wept at that point, claiming he was rejecting their love. His father angrily demanded that he leave the matter alone.

He was only too glad to return to college, and started to explore his nature in greater detail. It was not sufficient, however; Fallbrook’s library boasted of quite a few books on “ethnic studies” written through the filter of Western scholars. Wikipedia was much the same. These sources did not feel real to him, as if he knew in his bones what was real and what was bullshit, even if he did not know the specific truths of the matter.

He eventually fell to reading translated love and nature poetry. For whatever reason, what seemed to be frivolous beauty felt less likely to be tampered with.

And now it was summer, and finals had been over and done with a day ago. He would have to return home, to dismissive parents who would perhaps love him again if he suppressed his so-called third world, backwards side. If he pretended to believe the lies that Vietnam had nothing to offer the modern world.

 _I could run away, quite literally_ , he thought. Yet he was rootless. A ky-lan is supposed to be a wise creature, and how could any creature be wise without knowing the history of the culture that breathed it into being?

In the library, someone had passed him by, ephemeral and fleeting, a presence different from the graduate students who still had their own research and work to do. He had shrugged it off, only to discover the fairy-tale book left in his backpack, which now sat beside him underneath the apple tree. When he opened it, the first words he read were about the bird that had become the mother of the Vietnamese people, written in sheer beauty and truth that echoed into his soul. It was in Vietnamese, a language he had thought buried with the rest of himself.

The sun was setting, its rays shining painfully into his eyes. He squinted. He would have to find a new name for himself. Herself. He wondered idly what a ky-lan needed on her journey through the world, and what ky-lans ate, and whether a ky-lan could find sustenance in the wilds of America.

He flipped through the book once more. A feather fluttered out of a hidden page, iridescent blue and green. He touched it, and knew then that there was a world beyond the leaves of the tree, a reality that dappled like sunlight, touching the earth in a constant shifting. That was the world that a ky-lan could disappear into and discover herself in.

The ky-lan stood up on delicate split-hooves, a Timbuk2 satchel around her neck, containing a fairy-tale book (which was more than a mere sheaf of paper sandwiched between red leather), some fruit from the local Fred Meyer, and a canteen of water. She raised her head to regard, once more, the empty quad of Fallbrook, and then ran into the sunlight and disappeared from our world.

But not entirely. Like dappled sunlight, sometimes she returns and touches the earth and remembers her other existence, but always she returns home.


End file.
